


call it forgiveness (i'm not the queen of the dead) - station to station (the radio edit)

by torches



Category: Claymore
Genre: F/F, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-14
Updated: 2010-05-14
Packaged: 2017-10-09 22:09:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/92136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/torches/pseuds/torches
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>On the fifth day, the corpse moves.</i></p><p>(Contains spoilers up to and including chapter 102.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	call it forgiveness (i'm not the queen of the dead) - station to station (the radio edit)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



> References character death and features prominent violence towards animals. Written during the [Ladyslash Commentfic Fest](http://ladyslash.dreamwidth.org/7857.html) for the prompt: "Claymore, Riful/Irene, denial fic".
> 
> "Radio edit" because: this is the version without the porn.

It's a rainy season that drifts in on the later days of her journey, and the weather leaves the ground thick and churny beneath her feet, mud swallowing her boots up to the ankle. Merely walking becomes a struggle for the most physically fit; perhaps even an old claymore would find the journey troublesome.

She does not. Hardships like rain and mud and storm matter little to her. The country is scarred, and fear carries the events that transpired here along the mouths of the countrymen and countrywomen still remaining like seed-clouds on the wind. Something this momentous, she has to see.

Rain covers the field where the monster once lived and died and now still lingers, a rotting corpse's monument and a crumbling desecration of someone's sacred trust. In the depressions foul-smelling water gathers; in many of the pools disintegrating bodies lie, their skin flaking off where the carrion birds picked away before the rains came. She walks on.

Here, the ground furrows, a gash carved into the ground so deep even the wetness of the drenched field has not washed it away; there, the ground's unevenness belies that once it cracked under the weight of some hideous behemoth's fall.

But of the cause of these things, she finds no sign. It matters little; she has lived long enough to know the shape of what the world tries to forget.

The rain thunders against the hood of her cloak, drowning out everything but the sound of her own labored breathing. She twists her head to get a better view of her surroundings, and that is how she spots it.

At first, she dismisses the cold, white body lying halfway out of another defiled puddle as a corpse just like the others, but then she sees the corpse shudder: it is, after all, far too late for any dead impulses to still warm the flesh of the forgotten.

She stares at the corpse valiantly trying to remember how to live for so long that when she walks away, leaving it behind in the hammering rain, she can no longer remember how far the sun has fallen behind the endless clouds, and the rain does not stop that day or the day after that.

When the rains cease, she kills a deer, her foot swinging through the air like a hammer blow that carries her whole body with it, and she moves fast enough the deer only notices her as she falls, and by then it is already dead, its neck and skull cracking underfoot. She lays there atop the dead animal for a moment, staring at the sun and wondering how far above her the uncaring light that falls upon her now must lie, to be higher than mountains and clouds alike. But she is not a philosopher; the thought passes fleetingly before she rolls backwards off the deer until she can feel her weight press against her shoulder and her neck. She swings her legs up over her head before snapping them down to use the momentum to bring herself back to a sitting position. Slowly, she straightens; hooking a leg under the carcass, she bounces it in the air and with a precisely-aimed blow she kicks it onto her back, where its legs catch against the joins of her armor. She hunches forward carefully just to be sure, but the weight feels steady.

She has to repeat the process after it falls from her shoulders twice before she reaches the barren field. She suppresses an inward smile: when she first taught herself how to do this, it was once every step, and that was not so long ago.

The corpse has barely moved when she finds it again, a scraped, shallow gash in the ground by one hand the only sign it even still tries. She dumps the carcass by its shoulders without ceremony and sits down to wait.

The dead-corpse smell reeks off the deer by the fourth day, but she lets it rot. Still the corpse does not move more than a hair's twitch.

On the fifth day, the corpse moves, heaving its body from the fetid water, all the muscles in its arms taut as they push against the soft ground and nearly sink beneath it before finding purchase, and she spots under the tangled, knotted hair the flash of a mouth, _all teeth_, before the corpse's head buries itself in the decomposing flesh of her deer.

Most of the deer, the corpse vomits back up afterwards. But enough of the carcass stays down that she can feel eyes tracking her as she leaves, and tracking her as she returns, another dead deer slung across her shoulders.

"I wondered if you could eat the flesh of animals," she says, heaving it before the corpse. "I suspected you probably could, but that the nourishment was not enough to support your full strength." She sits down across from the corpse and meets its wary, baleful stare without pause. "Eat. I need you sane and sensible. As you are now, you're nothing more than an animal."

She says nothing else, and so the corpse eventually turns its attention back to the business of devouring the flesh of a deer while she silently watches.

Three more deer pass in this fashion before she even feels a faint prickle of pressure at the edges of her perception. The rains return the same day. She and the corpse share a silent conversation in which only hard awareness of the situation passes between them, and she kneels to offer a shoulder at the same moment the corpse's hand reaches out to take hold of it. The corpse misses the first try and brushes its fingers against the fabric covering her shoulder scar. Her still-silver eyes lock with the corpse's, but only for a moment; the corpse succeeds in wrapping its arms around her upper body on the second try.

Once they pass beyond the storm's edge, they still travel through the night and most of the next day before she finds anywhere offering board cheap and unquestioningly enough that the owners do not immediately turn them away on superstition alone. Stories have grown up surrounding the funeral grounds of the monster's corpse, and there are rumors that some yoma still roam the countryside looking for prey; it does not pay to look out of place in these parts. She can do little about her own appearance, but the corpse could do with being less corpse-like, and so she puts arm-holes in her cloak and they fashion a makeshift tunic from the fabric so she can investigate their options without abandoning the other boarders to the corpse. The corpse walks uncomfortably, with a limp, and continually begins to move from her side before stumbling and returning again, resentment a snarl curling in the edges of her lips. They do not stay a second night, and only the corpse actually sleeps.

"It was Priscilla," the corpse says, its voice hoarse, one day, after they've been traveling together for a month.

"I know," she says, and though she has obtained a new cloak by now, the corpse understands her meaning nonetheless.

She opens her eyes to find the corpse close enough to touch her feet, one finger poised to do just that. Its gaze flicks up to hers, challenging, daring, and unafraid, an unreadable expression on its mouth, and settles back on its wrists. They watch each other, her leaning up against a tree, it leaning on nothing but its hands, and then it gets to its feet, brushing leaves off its leggings, and walks into the night.

She lets it go even though she has been expecting this to happen for quite some time, because she has kept it sustained on meager portions of dead animal and nothing else and so it is barely more threatening than an above-average human would be, and she is still a skilled hunter of dangerous prey and much faster, and so she is surprised when it returns, a pile of firewood and stones tucked into its arms, and sets to building a fire.

"Are you cold?" she asks it, because corpses did not suffer cold any more than claymores, even weakened ones.

"No," it says, and shrugs. "I just like the light."

A season of storms comes in from the west and forces them to take up residence in an abandoned cabin to wait out the worst of it; dripping and covered in mud and grime up to their knees, they stumble into the darkness of the empty house and drop their cloaks at the door. The rain beats on the roof, but its builder appears to have made it sturdy enough to avoid leaks, at least for one night. The corpse removes its boots and sets them aside to dry, wriggling its toes experimentally and eyeing the door, but she knows the corpse won't move to leave through the door as long as she is sitting in front of it. She doesn't take off her boots, the whole night.

One night turns into two, and two turns into a fortnight, and even when the rains begin to clear neither of them shows signs of restlessness, it becomes clear that they are tired of traveling, at least for now. The corpse stops wearing boots. She stops wearing cloaks.

One day she finds the corpse outside, staring at the sky with tears running down its face, and the moment of vulnerability is so unnatural on its face that she starts forward. The corpse hears her move behind it and turns on her, snarling, before throwing itself back inside the cabin.

She doesn't go back in immediately, impressed by a realization: she has seen those eyes before, in Teresa's face as she fought her last. The corpse is capable of love.

The corpse does not leave the cabin for three weeks, forcing her to forage for it, although its eating habits mean she only needs to do this twice; when it finally does leave, it is only to take a bath.

There is a stream near the cabin wide enough and deep enough to make bathing possible; by unspoken agreement their baths are short and they take them separately. When the corpse emerges from the cabin for the first time in weeks, she is taking a bath, and so she is there to watch as the scarless corpse steps into the water. From her vantage point, sitting unclothed on a smoothed-out rock jutting up from the middle of the stream, with her head tilted slightly, she asks, "Do you feel naked like that? Without any scars?"

"I used to," the corpse replies, splashing water over its shoulders apparently just to watch it run off its skin. "But I've lived a long time since then." It soaks its spare tunic in the water, wrings it dry, and begins to scrub its back with the coarse fabric. "Nothing bothers me if I don't want it to," it says, with a serene, utterly unconcerned smile on its face.

She stares at it. "I see," she says; she thinks of the corpse lying in a puddle filled with its own blood and voided bowels, and says nothing further.

One thought persistently nags at the edge of her consciousness, and try as she might, she can't help but return to it. They encountered no news of claymores, no yoma, no sign of Organization presence in two months' worth of travel, and even though she chose their route to avoid the known Organization interests as thoroughly as she possibly could, the completeness of their absence unnerves her more than she cares to admit in the presence of a corpse. This is the only excuse she can find for why she asks it, one night, "Why do you stay?"

"You would kill me if I tried to run," the corpse says between bites of fresh deer-hock, and raises its eyebrows at her over the bloody chunk, its face a silent mask of bewildered laughter.

"I was under the impression you'd prefer death to captivity," she says, and tilts her head. "Did what happened underneath the gaze of that monster break you so completely?"

The corpse stills, its mouth settling into a thin line, and finishes its meal in silence. It says nothing the rest of the week, only responding in nods or shrugs or thumbs down.

"Why haven't you ever asked what happened that day?" it breaks the silence to ask her, its eyes burning holes in the back of her neck, as they're out hunting.

She doesn't give it an answer.

She lets her guard down. One time is all it takes, and the corpse is on her like a cat. Her head thuds against the floorboards and even with her strength all the wind is knocked out of her. The corpse is there, legs pinning her to the ground, fingers clenching, flexing around her throat, riding her attempts to extricate herself, a snarling smile on her face, _all teeth_ -

The corpse leans in close and Irene keeps her eyes open even as the sparks seep in around the edges of her vision, so she sees it when the fire goes out of the corpse's eyes and doesn't know what to do with it when the corpse's face comes close enough that her hair brushes Irene's face and she says, matter-of-factly,

"My name is Riful. And I am no one's prisoner."

Then she stands up, letting Irene go.

"Why do you stay?" she asks Riful again, months and months and months later. Riful looks up at her with a smile, and laughs.

"How many times do I need to tell you?" Riful asks, as she looks out the cabin window at the setting sun. She stays staring at the purpling sky for a long time.


End file.
